What my colleagues do at Great Ormond Street Hospital is remarkable

With the Give to GOSH appeal now in full swing, Dr. Peter Steer, CEO of Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), provides a reminder of why we need support…

With your help, we can make a difference and give more children and their families the life and the future they so desperately hope for – and deserve. I often get asked what makes Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) such a special place. Our hospital is located on a small street in Bloombsury in central London, yet more than half of our patients come from across the UK, often with illnesses that cannot be treated elsewhere and for which there is no known treatment.

We have 51 specialities, the UK’s widest range of hospital services for children on one site, and offer ground-breaking treatments to the most seriously ill children. The families that come through our doors often have nowhere else to go and put all their trust in our staff. It is our responsibility to provide the best possible care.

Our world-class research programmes drive the discovery of treatments for the future. Most recently, we helped one-year-old Layla through a technique that had previously only been tested in the laboratory. Layla was suffering from drug-resistant leukaemia but, thanks to the pioneering use of molecular scissors to edit her genes and create designer immune cells, she is now cancer-free and doing well. We hope that, with the help of your generous donations, we will be able to use research like this to help many more children.

Our staff transform the daily lives of every child in the hospital and help to inform practice and improvements throughout the country and the world. Their work is challenging. The children GOSH treats have some of the most complex conditions in the UK, if not the world. This means there are often difficult decisions about the best way forward with treatment and no right answers, even for these highly specialist doctors. We work closely with the children and their families to agree what is best for every child, recognising that they don’t always have the answer straight away.

It is of course the ground-breaking medicine and research that is remarkable and which gives the hospital such a renowned reputation, but what really makes GOSH special is the people who come through our doors every day; the dedicated staff, the loving parents, the resilient children – and you.

The very specialist work we do at GOSH is expensive. The NHS provides for us but to maintain the very highest standards of care, pioneer new treatments or simply make the experience of being in hospital a little more bearable, we need to raise funds above and beyond what the NHS can provide.

We need to redevelop two thirds of our older hospital buildings, fund life-saving research and make sure that the children we care for benefit from the best equipment and facilities possible. We have a duty to find cures for children with life-threatening illnesses. And for those children who have conditions that can’t yet be cured, we need to transform palliative care and pain management for them and their families. With your help, we can make a difference and give more children and their families the life and the future they so desperately hope for – and deserve.

Read more about the Give to GOSH appeal.

This article was originally published in The Independent on 25 November 2015.